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64 Youth's Golden Gleam |
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Of exceptional interest is the sixth figure in this group of singers, the celebrated Thomas
D. Rice. When he appeared in Cincinnati in 1848, billed, in the dignified theatrical manner, as "Mr. Rice/' there were special notices explaining that this was "Daddy Rice" of Jim Crow fame.27 Rice is credited by Professor Carl Wittke as the man who "gave the first entertainment in which a black-face performer was not only the main actor but the entire act."28 He was reputed to have developed the Jim Crow song after hearing a negro stage-driver singing along a street in Cincinnati sometime between 1828 and 1830.29 As a boy Stephen had met Rice at Pittsburgh and showed him several of his juvenile songs. During Rice's August 1848 engagement in Cincinnati as Jim Crow, Jumbo Jum and Otillo, Stephen again talked with the veteran who this time purchased Stephen's song "Long Ago Day" and asked him "to compose an air to some verses written by a G. Mellen (or Mellon) which Rice treasured for their sentiment."30 So, as Rice's grandson has recorded, "the song This Rose Will Remind You' came to be."30
3-Stephen wrote a letter from Cincinnati19 in May 1849 t0 ^e New York publisher, William
E. Millet, which reveals how casually he took the matter of composing these Ethiopian melodies. He explained that, before he de- |
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